How to Save Money on Trash Service

Paying for weekly curbside garbage pickup can really add up. When you’re working hard to pay off debt, save for a big goal, or fix your financial situation, you need to question every expense. Even your trash service!

When you’re accustomed to paying a bill, like your trash bill, every month, it’s easy to just chalk it as a mandatory expense, but it doesn’t have to be as expensive as you think.

For us, going from not having a trash bill at all, to suddenly having to pay for trash pickup really made us think twice. We thought creatively about ways to reduce or possibly eliminate having to pay for trash service.

Here are some ideas we came up with. I would love to hear your ideas for reducing or eliminating the cost of garbage pickup in the comments!

Shop around

This might sound obvious, but few people actually do it. Depending on where you live, you may have multiple trash service companies to choose from. If this is the case for you, you have a great chance to save money. Do your research to compare the companies. Look not just at the cost, but the service that is included.

If you don’t regularly look at competitors or talk to your companies about faithful customer discounts, then there are lots of ways that you can reduce your expenses, not just for trash, but for other household expenses.

Share with a neighbor

If both you and a neighbor uses less than the allotted disposal can, then sharing a service with a neighbor is a great option. I had a trash company actually recommend this idea to me when I called to ask if they had an every-other-week service instead of a weekly service. They said they didn’t but if I wanted to alternate weeks with a neighbor who wasn’t a big trash producer, that would work.

You could work this two ways. You could both contribute half of a can of trash each week, or you could alternate weeks by saving up your trash in your own can and using the official company’s can every other week.

Make sure you’re not breaking any rules by doing this. Saving money dishonestly is never worth it.

Go to the dump

Have you ever considered ditching curbside service altogether? I had never been to the dump until recently. After moving in, we took a truckload to the dump and I was shocked at how inexpensive it was. My wheels started turning.

I found out that they take recyclables for free, which includes not just cardboard boxes, cans and plastic milk jugs, but scrap metal, rigid plastic, and even electronics. At the dump, it costs less than $7 to dispose of two full 30 gallon trash cans . The trash cans themselves cost $15 each at Home Depot, but where we are, curbside pickup for that amount costs $25-$30 per month, so you can quickly make back the expense.

Part of the key to saving money with this plan is to reduce your trash output. Separating our recyclables really helps, since recyclables are free. With each dump load of two trash cans that we take, we have at least the same volume in recyclables. We also throw away little to no food trash, as we have both chickens and a compost pile. We have gone up to six weeks between dump trips.

Drastically reduce your output

An extreme way to reduce your trash bill is to drastically reduce the trash that you produce. I once read an article about a determined and environmentally charged couple who made it through a year and produced only one bag of trash! They were super careful about what they bought and made sure it was minimal or recyclable.

Now I understand that their story was pretty extreme for most of us, but it does show that with conscious effort, you really can reduce the amount of trash you produce. When we first started cloth diapering, I was shocked at how much less trash we had than when we used disposables. We started with cloth diapers when our third was already nine months old, so the change in trash volume was very apparent.

You don’t have to do any of this

What you decide to do (or whether you do anything at all) to save money on trash service is totally up to you. If this all sounds like more work than it’s worth, choose a different area of your budget to optimize. So much of it depends on your season in life and how much it’s worth it to you to save money in this area.

If I had had to pay for trash service when I was single, I could see myself going the drastic reduction route. Right now I’m content to take my cans to the dump every few weeks and pay $7 per month instead of the $30 that curbside pickup would cost. That might change at the end of the summer when the new little one joins our family. We’ll just have to see.

The point is, if you want to save money on trash service (or anything else), there is a way. It just takes some creativity and flexibility.

How about you?

What have you done to save money on trash service?

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Comments

I don’t have that option as our trash service is included in our water bill, but if you can make it work, go for it! I think it is also a great idea as it has helped you to better recycle. I know we throw away a lot that could be recycled. Also, did I read correctly that a “new little one” will be joining you in the fall? Congratulations!

Like Karen, our trash & recycle pick-up is included with the water & sewer bill. It all runs about $45 a month in the winter but because we live in a desert our water bill goes WAY up in the summer. We try to use as little as possible for watering garden & lawn, recycling grey water, catching what little rain falls in the summer. Seems like they’re gonna get you, one way or the other.

Garbage pick-up in our area costs $2.50/bag, but we recently just discovered that we’re allowed to dump trash at my husband’s work for free, as they have dumpsters that are emptied regularly but never full, so I was very excited about that!

Our neighborhood banded together and negotiated a group discount for curbside trash & recycling. My recycling bin usually holds more than my trash.

Bea Johnson and her family of four at Zero Waste Home produces a mason jar of trash annually. Very interesting concept of refusing to accept extra that we don’t need i.e., don’t accept a plastic bag bring a fabric bag instead.http://www.zerowastehome.com/

When we lived inside city limits, our trash pickup was included in our water bill and was around $16 per month if I remember correctly. We now live in the county just outside city limits with no trash service. Some people in our neighborhood have a private company do trash pickup but since the dump/recycling center is 5 minutes away, we have skipped trash pickup and take our own at no out-of-pocket cost to us (our tax dollars at work).

We bought 2 trash cans when we moved here 5 years ago and they are still going strong. Not pretty but they are for trash. LOL. We take a load to the dump about once a month; more if we are cleaning stuff out or have company.

We live in a rural area and are allowed a burn barrel. So our trash is free. We recycle and compost everything possible , so our trash is mostly paper and packaging. It may take a month to fill a trash can in our house. And we are not sending things to the landfill.

Wow these are great tips. We live in a townhouse, so the trash fee is included in the HOA fee, and there’s nothing we can do to reduce it. But I will keep these in mind for the future when we buy a single-family home.

Same. I have minimal garbage with our 3 person family. Recycle, compost, burn and donate. I take the trash to the same place that I get refunds on the bottles and cans, so one trip, about every 6 weeks, the bottle refund more than pays for my 4$ garbage can, as opposed to 12$ or so a month for weekly pick ups. And it isn’t far from where I live.

I can so relate to this. My husband and I first dumped our trash in his aunt’s office dumpster for the first few years we were married. We were so broke, we couldn’t even afford trash!! Now we are debt free, and I’m so grateful for that crazy season of sacrifice. Ironically, he now sells trash for one of the leading national trash companies. God sure does has a sense of humor!

It’s funny that you bring this up; my family is oddly creative in saving money on trash service. I can’t say I want to adopt all of their habits, but sharing service with family or neighbors is definitely worthwhile.

I love your article! When I was first researching how to stop buying trash bags, that’s basically the general idea that I ran across, was to cut down trash output.

Since we were married, we’ve always taken our trash to my husband’s work. Since we got serious about reducing trash though, there’s not very much trash to take anymore. I also eliminated buying garbage bags altogether.

Beyond regular curbside or recycling center recycling, so much can be recycled. There are drop spots to recycle clothing and shoes and other items can be mailed in for recycling. TerraCycle, for example, has a lot of free recycling programs. I participate in their dental care recycling program and their energy bar wrapper program. I try to also buy stuff with the end in mind. I take my own produce bags to the store and try to go for the loose produce, over bagged produce, whenever possible. If I need to buy something in packaging, I try to go for the most recyclable options.

Our local recycling center runs by paid memberships, but luckily we only pay $45 per year for membership.

I also compost very heavily.

We’ve eliminated most disposable items from our household. The ones that have to be disposable, we try to do biodegradable options so that they don’t have to be landfilled. For example, we use biodegradable silk dental floss in a refillable container, brush with bamboo toothbrushes, and use pine horse bedding for cat litter. When we’re done with our toothbrush and floss, they can be composted.

I package up the little bit of trash that we do have in some sort of repurposed bag. When you don’t have much trash, any bag will work. Bread bags and kitty litter bags can hold trash. Then my husband takes the little bit of trash and puts it in his work dumpster.

I really like the tip of combining your trash with your neighbors to save money, especially if both of you never use more than half of your dumpster each week. My wife and I recently moved into a new neighborhood, and since it is just the two of us, we don’t go through a lot of garbage. I will be sure ask around and see if any of my neighbors are in a similar situation, and maybe we could share a trash can!

I work for a trash company, nice ideas, going to the dump will cost you more in the long run. Biggest thing I could add to this, you want to save money. Buy a smaller bin. I can say the larger the bins people have at their house, the more they buy. For some reason people feel they have to fill the bin every week, the faster they fill it. The faster they have to replace what they put in. Weird concept I know. But it will save people hundreds of dollars a month in overall consumer spending by simply using a smaller bin.

I have not done anything yet I was thinking how we went from no bill to a 60 $ a month. How can I find out if I can say No to waste management? We don’t have trash every week and what I can flush I do ,and feed the street cat’s. Can we be forced to use the waste management company?